Back in the 20th century, marketing aspired to build champion brands
that inspire people to just do it. Brands that elicit feelings, inspire awe, and
occupy a piece of our mental, social, and cultural landscape.
But something happened between then and now. Our ambitions changed, and got smaller.
Marketers often don't seem to aspire to build champion brands anymore. In fact, many
marketers seem to have dispensed with brandbuilding as a goal altogether, no longer
aspiring to build something magical, but in fact the very opposite, a factory.
You Are Talking About Marketing, Right?
That's right, a discipline that once dealt in magic now aspires to run like an assembly
line for creating media and
content assets. Blogs. Social media posts. Videos. Email.
All have become widgets by another name. People like me who sell
content marketing are
supposed to like this.
But in truth, this is a navel-gazing goal. It's largely organizational. It doesn't
consider what customers need, or how to solve their problems, or build your brand. In
other words, it lessens the value of what I can provide.
So How Did Marketing End Up Here?
Lots of things contributed to marketing's current state. Channels proliferated. Automation entered the
process.
Organic social media divorced content creation from marketing purpose in many
organizations. Charlatans lied to us about what could be achieved digitally, taught us to
want the wrong things, and stole your money through ad fraud. The reasons go on and on.
More than can really be explored in a blog.
But what we can explore is why this aspiration for marketing as a factory is fundamentally
flawed, and what can be done about it.
Creativity Is the Prime Ingredient in Marketing
Corporations are naturally inclined to love the idea of running a marketing department
like a factory. It implies scalability, efficiency, replicability, minimized risk, and
idiot proofing.
And if you view marketing as a process where messaging and content are created,
targeted, and published in a highly rigorous and disciplined process akin to running a
newspaper (an understandable position after a decade of being told that all businesses
must think like publishers), the notion of marketing as a factory has intuitive
appeal.
But marketing is not journalism. Journalism is impartial storytelling that strictly deals
in facts (or at least that's what it's supposed to be). A news story doesn't need to deal
in intangibles, it just needs to be complete, according to the "who, what, when, where,
why, and how" format.
But marketing and brandbuilding are creative storytelling. They have to be. Marketing is
expected to work magic and you can't automate magic. Without magic, we've failed as
marketers, because we're no longer adding value. We're just coloring things in.
Creativity Is Anathema to a Factory
Factories run on repetition and predictability. Creativity is the opposite of
both. Put
one creative person on an assembly line and trouble will follow. Put all creative
people on an assembly line and that assembly line will be extremely slow, and you'll
end up with a different finished product, created at a different speed, each time.
Factories Know Where They're Going
Factories can work with their enviable speed and efficiency because when an assembly
line first starts up, one already knows exactly what the finished product is supposed
to be. One knows its dimensions. Its composition. How it should perform. And how much
deviation constitutes a failure.
You know that it will be a chair, for instance, and you know that it has to support
the weight of a full-grown person, and you know its function (i.e., deskwork) and where
it's meant to be used (i.e., in an office).
But creative work is nothing like this. When you start the creative process, you only
have a rough idea of what the end product will be. Everything else is decided largely
as you go along, often in collaboration with others, with the occasional pause thrown
in while you wait for inspiration to strike, and all those things take time.
Factories Know When There's a Problem
Factories have feedback mechanisms that reveal problems. If there's not enough output,
somebody complains. If there's too much output, inventory piles up. If products are
substandard, inspections find them or customers complain.
Twenty-first-century marketing is nothing like this. Now that brands have websites,
social media, and organic content, they can publish a near infinite amount of content
and receive very little feedback as to what effect it's having. Or they can publish
very little content and receive more or less the same feedback.
If a brand publishes something bad, people rarely take the time to stop and say "this
post is terrible." It will be greeted with silence instead, and silence can have many
causes, making it inherently harder to interpret than feedback.
This lack of feedback is one of the primary reasons why marketing has become widgetry.
Without feedback, there's little incentive for marketing widgets to serve a goal. So
the widgets are now the goal. They are content, existing largely to take up space.
Factories Have Different Metrics
Factories are oriented around speed, cost efficiency, failure rate, output quota, etc.
But think about what happens if you orient marketing around those things.
Output Volume
It's not that hard at a factory to determine the ideal number of widgets you should be
producing each month. But marketing is nothing like this. There is no objective and/or
reliable data out there for how many assets you should be producing.
There's only trial and error. And even that is pretty unreliable given the high rates
of turnover we have in our tools and personnel.
And once output volume starts being used as a metric, it'll keep getting increased. And
while having some optimization here is a good idea, there's no way of knowing how much
is enough.
With organic reach per post ever declining, channels ever proliferating, and AI fanning
the flames, there literally is no ceiling, other than when people burn out and quit.
Failure Rate
A failure is easy to determine at a factory. It's a deviation exceeding a pre-defined
deviation from a pre-defined ideal. In other words, a failure is something that stands
out.
But what's an ideal blog post? TV ad? Whitepaper? And how much deviation from it
constitutes failure? I don't know. Do you?
In marketing a success is something that stands out (i.e., the exact opposite), and it
isn't really pass/fail either. It's more like a spectrum.
And yet there are still plenty of failures. Anyone who spends a few minutes actually
consuming ads will tell you that. Sturgeon's Law says that 90% of everything is crap.
And if you believe the
Ad Rating Database, a little over 50% of ads are ineffective
(i.e., failures). But what about the success rate?
Copywriting legend George Tannenbaum has compared advertising to
baseball, where it
only takes a batting average a little over .300 to be a league leader. But if you
have a .300 success average at a factory, your investors will want your head on a
spike before long.
Cost Efficiency
Don't even think about this one.
RoI is not a good metric to use. It doesn't measure
effectiveness, only efficiency, and doing the bare minimum can be highly-efficient.
Use RoI as your north star, and you'll end up dragging your brand through the mud by
utilizing high RoI tactics that require relatively little upfront investment, such
as spam email.
And if I haven't convinced you yet as to why RoI is a bad marketing metric, let's
shift gears and use movies as an example. The genre with the highest RoI is horror.
The reason why is because the young people who watch these movies are undemanding.
They only want things that are scary and gross. They don't care if the writing is
terrible or the acting is bad. The characters are just going to die anyway.
And most horror movies are bad. Fantastically bad. But their RoI is great, so
nobody who makes them cares if they're bad. Would you want to try and build your
brand that way?
Speed
Until now, a perpetual drive to increase asset creation speed has led to increased
hiring or greater use of freelancers and agencies, but that often hasn't helped as
intended because approvals are often a chokepoint in marketing.
Now we have
AI, but still the
same chokepoint. This will lead to either approvers overloading and burning out, or
approvals being turned over to AI as well, which is Russian roulette, and sooner or
later there will be a mess to clean up.
Why Extreme Division of Marketing Labor Doesn't Work
Media and channel proliferation has led to an extreme division of marketing labor
not unlike what you see at factories. But division of labor works for factories
because you already know what the end product will be. But in marketing, it
creates five problems.
1. Too Many Technicians, Not Enough Marketers
You end up with control over major channels and asset classes by specialists who
only understand the channels and asset classes, not marketing or your business,
This has made it very easy for marketing departments and
agencies to be
overrun by people who, paradoxically, hate capitalism, which is an untenable
situation.
2. Marketing Assets That Are Professional But Not Persuasive
When you don't know exactly what the end product will be, you must ask questions,
lots of questions, in order to make the best creative decisions. Specialists and
technicians often aren't plugged into the rest of the company in the ways they
need to be to get those questions answered.
With either problem, the results are often the same: finished assets that are
professional, optimized, expensive, and
ineffective, because they were optimized
for criteria not involving the customer, or perhaps even the product.
3. Overloaded Marketing Managers
In a department full of specialists, the boss will have to make all the marketing
decisions, and sweat all the details, and that just isn't sustainable (as alluded
to earlier).
4. Setbacks When Someone Leaves
In a department full of worked-to-death specialists and no generalists, when
someone leaves (and someone is always leaving) you're really screwed for a
while because nobody else knows how to do the departed's job, and nobody has
time to do it anyway.
And it can take a month or more to replace that person. And even longer for their
replacement to start getting up to speed and be useful.
And because you're being run like a factory, not only is the departed's individual
productivity lost, everyone's productivity down the assembly line suffers as well,
making for a devastating loss when you're a company with zero redundancy (i.e.,
running at maximum efficiency).
5. It Paves the Way for Our Doom
Let's not kid ourselves. Today's automated factories were once factories full of
people. That's the natural evolutionary path of things.
Machines are not great generalists. But they're great at repetitive tasks. And
we're heading for a future where we won't have marketing departments anymore.
We'll just have marketing teams, comprised of a marketing lead, a digital
marketer, a product marketer, one or two other roles, and a bunch of AIs.
Automation has made the quality of marketing output nothing but worse so far. Do
you think it'll magically start getting better when the marketing profession no
longer employs anyone with creative skills?
Factory Work Is for Big Fish
When you run a marketing department like a factory, basically you are
saying that the wars of persuasion can only be won by the volume of your output,
not by the quality or content of your messaging.
Now some will disagree with that. They'll say that victory is achieved through
mass personalization and precision targeting. But those things are fools' gold,
and will continue to be for a while. Our data is
compromised. Progress isn't being made. Key players are starting to
block access
to consumer data. And
regulators may ultimately make it impossible.
And without them, all a factory can give you is output volume. And while the
Internet is indeed something of a noise contest, making the idea of output volume
as a goal somewhat appealing, if you actually embrace this thinking in a
marketing department, you embrace failure.
There will always be a bigger fish than you. A smaller factory can't outfactory a
larger one. You must win some other way.
So What Should Marketing Do Instead?
I know that pointing out flaws in a system is easy, and having better ideas and
implementing them is hard. One cannot flip a switch and magically change
everything in marketing overnight. But I feel like the process begins with slowing
down a bit.
Marketing departments are busy ticking boxes. Doing things because a checklist
requires it, not because it solves a marketing problem. Busy, busy, busy. More,
more, more.
We have to start backing away from this. We got into this thinking because of
channel proliferation. And because of decade-old thinking about paid tactics and
organic content. But you can't win a psychological battle through manufacturing.
Try making fewer assets instead that are better in quality, made for customers,
not for search engines (SEO ultimately works by appealing to customers).
Try devising a smaller number of bigger and better ideas, adapted to different
channels. Not a million little crappy ideas, each devised for a single channel only.
And by "bigger and better," I also mean more creative, not just more polished,
or more iterated, or more promoted.
Everybody has whitepapers, videos, case studies, and social posts. If you really
want to reach people, you also need to create things no one else has. That's how
brands are built.
But marketing cannot be some artisan utopia. Marketing is about business. That
means we need to reintroduce both sales thinking and creative thinking into the
marketing process again, and use metrics that serve marketing goals, business
outcomes, or brandbuilding goals, not just tactical or channel optimization goals.
This will require businesses to rethink who they hire, who they fire, and how
they work with agencies. Context is everything, so I can't give you all the
answers. But this should give you a hint regarding the questions.
